Team:Freiburg/Team

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Who are we?

This year’s iGEM team consists of 14 students from many different scientific fields including biology, chemistry, medicine, biochemistry/biophysics and computer science. Our team is supervised by Jun. Prof. Maximilian Ulbrich and Dr. Nicole Gensch, both being part of the scientific staff of the BIOSS Centre for Biological Signalling Studies. We also get advice and support from Luisa Keilholz and Adrian Fischer, former iGEM participants who are sharing their experiences and knowledge with us.
Niklas Vesper - Brain of the team and the one you will find in lab at every time of the day (or rather “night”) doing his job as head of cloning group. Also he is responsible for modeling, internal wiki and registry pages. Most impressive thing about this guy is the sparkles in his eyes when telling someone about all the crazy and cool stuff he is learning and when his brain gets filled with new facts and pictures of glowing gels. When it gets late at night you can clearly see the mischief in his eyes and know he is up to something! Always tries to lighten the mood with his (most of the time pretty dumb and silly) jokes:D
Nathalie Wagner - One of the hardest working team members we got! You could consider her the head of the dry lab since she is responsible for all the organisational stuff, human practice and most importantly our finances. Without her, the team would probably have been all over the place. Her part as a team leader is not always the easiest since she had to remind us to do certain things at least once a day. She also makes sure we don’t miss any deadlines and lives out her creativity with the styling of our poster, presentation, external wiki and all the graphics.
Katharina Ostmann - But first, coffee! Katha is one of our most precious team members. She may not always be the most approachable person in the morning without coffee, but if you have a lot of stuff on your mind or to do in the lab, she is always the first to offer you her help. Even though she herself is a group leader for protein purification and the 3rd chairman of our nonprofit association. Her other tasks mainly include checking the requirements for medals and prizes and the sponsoring, but honestly, she helps out wherever she can and is needed.
Danja Steinberg - Our mother of dragons .. ehm .. I mean .. producer of Spores! Danja is doing all the work the other teams rely on as the head of the bacillus basic group. It is hard work, we know, but she makes it all happen and we could not think about iGEM without her! Besides being awesome in the lab for most of the day, she always has an open ear to all your problems. Apart from being responsible for sponsoring and taking care that we don’t miss to fullfil all iGEM requirements, she helps writing the texts for this Wiki.
Wladislaw Stroukov - Our sub-galactic hyper emperor. Wlad is our trump card when it comes to labwork. He has a lot of experience and is keen to share it with you if you are interested. Do you have a problem or a question about a method or the project in general? Just go and ask him, I assure you he will give you more than enough information. Wlad is also head of the wet lab and one of the most dedicated team members, who you will always find in the lab at night.
Mario Ramos Garcia - Fountain of caffeine and energy!! You will always find Mario sitting in the corner of our seminar room, tapping away on his computer (most likely doing some exhausting stuff like the statistics ) and in front of him either coffee or a big can of monster energy… and that at all times! As the head of the group 5 he is practically glued to our amazing plate reader from BMG labtech and you can watch him pipetting like a thousand dilutions. Always with a nice scent of shampoo surrounding him, since he is also responsible for our fun application the dandruff shampoo.
Vivien Jesenofsky - Our happy person. Always being around to cheer you up if you had a bad day. She is also part of our adhesion group where she is helping Kevin and Chris wherever she can. Together with Tina, Vivi is mainly responsible for our collaboration with other teams, so you might have already gotten in contact with her via skype or mail. Vivi is well know in the team for leaving little funny and weird notes all over the lab, which makes everyone happy.
Christina Imkea Saw Zoina Soon - But don’t call her that. We don’t know why but she prefers to be simply called Tina. Together with Mario, she is responsible for the activation assay - the second part of our proof of concept and our other good smelling application, the shampoo. As part of the collaboration team Tina helps us to get in touch with other teams and plans tons of stuff we could do together.
Syed Mohsin Ali - You always need a computer guy on your side… at least if you don’t want to lose your head while staring at endless computer codes. Together with Nathalie he is responsible for our external Wiki and introduced our minds to the magical and very confusing world of HTML.
Kevin Kieselmann - Still waters run deep. He sure isn’t a man of many words, but he is head of adhesion group where he and Chris work on the adhesion of our little dragons .. ehm .. spores. Most of his time he spends looking through the microscope, making sure the spores do what he wants them to do. Apart from this, he is helping with the sponsoring and our facebook page.
Christian Massute - Our granddad and model. Chris is our representative when it comes to the public affairs of our project.
Apart from his appearance he is also doing a great job in our laboratory work. Together with Kevin and Vivi he is responsible for the Adhesion part of our Project. Beside being the head of sponsoring, he does the traveling organisation, so that no other member has to loose their mind worrying about it.
Lucy Wong - Our medical treasure chest. Do you have questions about anything medicine-related while working? Just write our medicine student Lucy and get the answer straight away! This is the benefit of working in an interdisciplinary team like this. Getting her priorities straight, she always gets her stuff done in a very little amount of time.
Yannic Schäfer - Source of creativity and funny lab photos! Yannic’s main tasks are human practice, sponsoring and documentation of our summer. So all of the pictures you find in this wiki are “made by Yannic”. He is always interested in different parts of our project and goes to each lab group from time to time to ask questions and learns exciting things. In his free time, which right now - let’s be honest here - is none, he usually is all about movies and is always ready to give you his opinion on them.
Zaid Ur rehman - Our cooking-tec guy. Zaid is always there to help out with technological questions concerning the external wiki or even with smaller problems like fixing the internet on your laptop. Together with Mohsin and Nathalie, he takes on the enormous task of designing the external wiki and makes sure our project is well presented online and for the judges.